The 2017 Tony Awards: Lost in Spacey

In his opening number at last night’s Tony Awards, Kevin Spacey poked fun at his last-resort status as host, but then spent the rest of the broadcast hamming it up shamelessly.

PHOTOGRAPH BY KEVIN MAZUR / GETTY FOR TONY AWARDS

Who says that theatre can’t cause a ruckus? On Sunday, as CBS was teasing “Broadway’s biggest night,” controversy was engulfing the Public Theatre’s production of “Julius Caesar,” at Shakespeare in the Park. Breitbart and Fox News had caught on to the fact that Oskar Eustis’s production recasts Caesar as a pussy-grabber in a red tie, and his wife, Calpurnia, as a bombshell with a Slavic accent. Faux-outraged headlines, like “NYC Play Appears to Depict Assassination of Trump,” quickly landed “Julius Caesar” in the same crosshairs that had targeted Kathy Griffin and Reza Aslan earlier in the week. The Public’s corporate sponsors freaked out and cravenly pulled their funding from the production: first Delta Airlines, then Bank of America.

Cheeky and provocative as the production is, no one who sees it—or who has read “Julius Caesar”—could mistake it for an incitement toward political violence, against President Trump or otherwise. (Read Rebecca Mead’s Cultural Comment on the controversy.) If anything, it allows liberal audiences to laugh through whatever wish fulfillment an anti-Trump coup might offer, before throwing the consequences back in their faces. Killing begets killing, democracy descends into civil war, and the whooping, fickle crowd is the true enemy. Oh, well. There is no room for dramaturgical nuance in the tit-for-tat culture war that never seems to let up in the Trump era. Remember when the Rockettes were under fire for performing at the Inauguration? It’s been a long five months.

There was no mention of l’affaire “Julius Caesar” at the seventy-first annual Tony Awards, but there were Rockettes: more of them, it seemed, than had shown up to the Inauguration, though you’d have to check with Sean Spicer for the numbers. At Radio City Music Hall, the Rockettes were introduced by John Mulaney and Nick Kroll, of “Oh, Hello on Broadway,” who took the opportunity to extol New York’s native cream cheese, Temp Tee. It was far from the most random transition of the night, though probably the funniest. After all, the show started with Kevin Spacey dressed as Norma Desmond and Stephen Colbert wearing a groundhog head, minutes before the former Rangers player Ron Duguay introduced a musical about Newfoundland.

It was a grab-bag sort of ceremony, without the galvanizing force of last year’s “Hamiltonys.” Still, there were a couple of unifying themes. One was “Dear Evan Hansen,” the breakout musical about a teen-age loner turned sobbing accidental scam artist, which won six Tony awards, including Best Musical, Best Original Score (by Benj Pasek and Justin Paul, fresh off their Oscar for “La La Land”), Best Book of a Musical (Steven Levenson), and Best Actor in a Musical (Ben Platt). Platt delivered one of the broadcast’s best numbers, as well as its most motormouthed speech, which began, adorkably, “Holy crap! O.K.—fast! Fast! O.K.! This is a Tony. Hello. O.K. O.K.,” before he thanked his physical therapist, “so that I don’t become a hunchback.”

If the ceremony left the impression that Platt’s performance was the undisputed toast of the Broadway season, that’s because Bette Midler didn’t perform a song from “Hello, Dolly!” The omission was the result of a loudly publicized dispute between the Tony producers and the musical’s lead producer, Scott Rudin. We were left, instead, with David Hyde Pierce performing the second-act curtain-raiser, “Penny in My Pocket,” which was cut out of town from the original run and restored in the revival. It’s a perfectly nice song, performed winningly, but it didn’t come close to representing Jerry Herman’s score or Jerry Zaks’s outstanding revival. Couldn’t Jefferson Mays and Jennifer Ehle have intervened, as the Norwegian peace-brokers they play in “Oslo”? Nevertheless, as expected, “Hello, Dolly!” won Best Revival of a Musical, and Midler, as expected, won Best Actress in a Musical, turning her acceptance speech into a literal showstopper. “I can’t remember the last time I had so much smoke blown up my ass, but there is no more room,” she told the crowd. When the orchestra tried playing her off, she yelled, “Shut that crap off!” and kept talking. And talking. Filibustered, the orchestra relented. You had to be a little bit impressed: not even Patti LuPone could pull off that diva move.

Another motif was Spacey’s boundless capacity for shtick. Holy cannoli, this guy’s a cutup. Did you see his Johnny Carson impression? How about his—Lord help us—Bill Clinton? Spacey was a last-minute choice for host, after the Tony producers got turned down by Tina Fey and several others and had to scramble to find an m.c. In his opening number, Spacey poked fun at his last-resort status, but then used the rest of the broadcast to ham it up shamelessly. It was like being at a workshop of his multi-character solo show: there were uncomfortable jokes about being “in the closet,” endless references to his movie credits, and even a Bobby Darin song to close out the evening. When the announcer introduced Jill Biden, to talk about a veterans’ initiative with the musical “Bandstand,” you may have been relieved to discover that it was actually her, not Spacey in a wig.

What made Spacey’s self-indulgent bits more painful was knowing what got left out of the telecast. As usual, the design and honorary awards were handed out off-camera—O.K., fine, maybe America doesn’t need to see the winner of Best Scenic Design of a Play. (It was Nigel Hook, whose set for “The Play That Goes Wrong” is a masterpiece.) But surely something could have made way for James Earl Jones’s Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Theatre. Incidentally, some of Jones’s earliest parts were at Shakespeare in the Park, including the title role in “Othello,” in 1964. Even the “In Memoriam” segment seemed off. No offense to Boyz II Men’s “It’s So Hard to Say Goodbye to Yesterday,” but wasn’t there a theatre song that could have done the job?

On a happier note, the Best Play category was an embarrassment of riches this year. While the device of having the nominees give book reports on their own plays is slightly silly, it’s hard to complain about seeing Paula Vogel, Lucas Hnath, J. T. Rogers, and Lynn Nottage on television. The award went to Rogers’s “Oslo,” though the wealth got spread around in the other categories, including Best Direction of a Play (Rebecca Taichman, for her astounding production of “Indecent”) and Best Actress in a Play (Laurie Metcalf, as the liberated Nora of “A Doll’s House, Part 2”). Best Revival of a Play went to “August Wilson’s Jitney,” and Cynthia Nixon won Best Featured Actress in a Play for “Lillian Hellman’s The Little Foxes”—both plays conveniently putting the playwright’s name right in the title, to avoid confusion with “Quentin Tarantino’s The Little Foxes.”

If there was a recurring theme I liked best, it was Tony winners describing their scrappy beginnings as working actors. Michael Aronov (“Oslo”) recalled living in a studio apartment so small that “if you walked in too fast, you’d fly out the window.” Rachel Bay Jones (“Dear Evan Hansen”) thanked “my Nana, who sold her engagement ring so that I could move to New York to be an actor.” And Gavin Creel (“Hello, Dolly!”), wearing a powder-blue tux, dedicated his prize to the University of Michigan School of Music, Theatre & Dance, where a scholarship changed his life. “If you’re out there and you have money—and I know a lot of you in this room have a lot of it—start a scholarship,” he said.

More pointedly, Kevin Kline (“Present Laughter”) gave a shout-out to the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities, “without whom probably half of the people in this room would not be here.” It was an indirect rejoinder to Donald Trump, Jr., who hours earlier had tweeted, in response to the “Julius Caesar” fracas, “I wonder how much of this ‘art’ is funded by taxpayers?” I’d invite him to catch “Indecent,” Vogel’s bracing look at how, back in the twenties, a Yiddish play with a lesbian kiss tested America’s tolerance for free expression. If there is to be a crackdown on politically subversive productions of Shakespeare plays, A) democracy is indeed as fragile as “Julius Caesar” suggests, and B) don’t tell Kevin Spacey. He’s got wigs, and he’s ready to go.